The World of Tomorrow (1984) User Reviews

Unique and heartfelt

[ricohman · 9/10 · 27 September 2005]

I first saw this film in 2000 as a part of an exhibit about the World's Fair at the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum. It sparked a new interest in the World's Fairs of New York, an interest which continues to this day.

The filmmakers could not have picked a better narrator than Jason Robards. His calm and direct voice conveys a nostalgic, but sometimes almost critical, mystery about the Fair's significance.

In the director's opinion, the World's Fair marked a change in America's way of viewing the world. It was as though we were literally changing from black-and-white and moving into color. The vision of the future as presented through the fair was beautiful, but complicated and sometimes contrived and naively idealistic, especially given the political setting of 1939 and 1940, as war was dawning in Europe. A mention is made of America's concerns about having such a large display by Communist Soviet Union. It also mentions the irony of one country (Lithuania, I believe?), which had a display at the beginning of the Fair, but during the Fair, the country was annexed by the Soviets, and by the end of the Fair, they no longer had a country to which they could return. America itself would grow and enter a much more complicated future.

Whether you agree with the director, if you are interested in this time period or the World's Fairs, you'll probably enjoy footage of the Fair, including excerpts of speeches by Mayor Joe LaGuardia and the many exhibits and structures of the Fair, of course.

Toward the end of the film, I was so moved during one point in the poetic narration that I cried. I strongly encourage people to see this film and I hope that one day it will be released on DVD, or whatever the current media format of the time will be.

An Unappreciated Classic Documentary

[jacksflicks · 10/10 · 2 June 2013]

It is a shame that one of the finest, most poignant and important film documents in history is not in video distribution. Thus, the sparse vote count. And it's shameful that, as of this writing, the average score is an absurd 6.6.

Finest, not only because it is narrated by one of our greatest actors and narrators, Jason Robards, Jr., but the source material comes largely from a home movie Robards' father made of their family visit to one of the most famous and important of all World's Fairs, the New York World's Fair of 1939. So, the history here is first-hand.

Famous, because it was a grand fair, perhaps the grandest of all, because it was the closest to how we think of fairs, not only as exhibitions but as entertainments; and being a *World's* fair, both were on a grand scale. And being in 1939, technology, the showcase of World's Fairs, was not just modern, it was beyond modern. In fact, the title of this film, The World of Tomorrow, was the title of the Fair.

Imagine yourself living in the late 1930s. You were weaned on science fiction; to live in the future -- in fact, to be a "space cadet" -- was to be cool. The old dynasties that gave us World War I were gone, and a brave new world of flight, electronics, robotics, high-speed travel -- of color! -- was out of the labs and into the grasp of ordinary people. The future was actually palpable. But just as present was the past, the folk traditions of the peoples represented at the Fair. To be there had to evoke the wonderment of being transported in time and space. And this sense of wonderment is transmitted to us by a child who was there as his father recorded it. I believe the 1939 New York Word's Fair was the template for Disneyland.

And then, there's the poignancy. This bright World of Tomorrow, as Churchill warned, was about to "sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister...by the lights of perverted science". It was an understatement. The 1939 of the happy, festive and confident New York World's fair brought the most horrible war in history. Some of the nations exhibited at the fair would no longer exist a year later. I'm reminded of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. By 2001 the human race had colonized the moon and was sending a mission to "Jupiter and Beyond". And in 1968, when the film came out, 2001 seemed like a perfectly plausible future, given that we were in the midst of the Apollo mission. But just like 1939, 2001 became a milestone of human depravity.

In the important ways, our civilization has usually fallen woefully short of optimistic prognostications. I say, "in the important ways" because who cares if the instrumentation of Flash Gordon's spacecraft was quaintly non-digital -- it got them to the planet Mongo, didn't it?

Finally, The World of Tomorrow poses the most important question for the human race: Will we ever measure up to our promise?

the lessons of nostalgia

[mjneu59 · 8/10 · 17 January 2011]

Visit the 1939 New York City World's Fair, and see the future as it should have been!

Your guide will be Jason Robards, Jr., who as a carefree ten year old boy can be seen thrilling to the sights and sounds of this greatest of all international expositions, and cheerfully mugging for the camera in his father's home movies!

He'll lead you through a Utopian Never-Never Land of scientific wonders and social achievements, including the popular Futurama Exhibit, featuring a scale model of Democracity, the perfect planned community for the next generation!

Follow the all-American Middletons (Mom, Dad, Babs and Bud) from Main Street, Indiana, a promotional film family touring pavilions representing all the mightiest nations on Earth, with the notable exception of Germany, which at that moment was planning a world event of an altogether different sort!

The ironies of hindsight make this a fascinating documentary, suggesting (not without regret) that optimism is no match for the harsh reality of current events. The film includes plenty of rare color archival footage.

Hauntingly sad documentary about the lost of yesterday's tomorrow

[Womzilla · 2 February 1999]

John Crowley's documentary about the 1939-40 New York World's Fair recreates both the majesty and the low comedy of one of the greatest public relations triumphs of the century.

Robard is impeccable in his careful narration of the memories of an old man, trying to recreate the escaped glory and promise of the Fair of his youth.

The optimism of the Fair--with its ubiquitous motto, "I Have Seen the Future"--is undercut at every turn both by the knowledge of the impending failure of Western civilization (in the form of World War II) and the long-term loss of the promise of a better world.

Possibly the finest documentary you will ever see.

Poignant evocation

[rdkugel2 · 8/10 · 26 November 2006]

This is one of my favorite documentaries because of the way it captures the essence of the moment. Poignant is the best adjective to describe it.

Documentaries can be many things but usually they are an attempt by a filmmaker to capture real (as opposed to dramatic) life so the viewer can understand that reality. (That we are entertained in the process is beside the point.) I believe this film does an impressive job of giving the viewer the perspective of historical events in ways that would have been familiar had you lived (as Jason Robards Jr. did) as they unfolded. Not the condensed, foreshortened and heavily contexted version you would read about in a history book, where the outcomes are foreordained and marching to the historian's clean and neat conclusions. Not the newsreel or Life Magazine version of the events at the time. If you've ever witnessed an event and then watched it portrayed on TV or written up in a newspaper account you know there is a difference. In our own lifetimes, the question "where were you when the twin towers fell?" or (for those older) "when Kennedy was shot" can evoke a great deal of recollection of the context of the moment - those personal experiences that are the singular human importance of the event. No single point of view summarizes everyone's experience, but a multitude of glimpses into the everyday-ness of life set against the backdrop of history that can evince the feel of the times. This is what is captured for me in "The World of Tomorrow."

So, what was life like in the US in the days of "Love Finds Andy Hardy" and "The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair?" Watch the film.

I believe it is impossible for those living in the US today born after the WWII (as I was) to truly contemplate just how horrific the times were for most who lived through it. The Depression is portrayed in cartoon fashion in history lessons. The scale and scope of brutality of the period dwarfs the events of Darfur, Rwanda, Cambodia and the Balkans. Against that awfulness, people lived their lives. In the middle of the catastrophe that was the 1930s, the bright Technicolor promise of the World's Fair to come is slowly born in 1939 and then quickly peters out monochromatically the following year. It confronts the day-to-day realities of life as the world stumbles into a resumption of the previous generation's unresolved war. This is captured well in the pacing and delivery of the film.

The World of Tomorrow has to turn a buck – don't we all? Yet the vision and imagination that drove it prevailed. The metaphor of the ash heap turned into fantasyland applies to the world that eventually came to be in the US. The lavishness of the life of the average American today compared to theirs is striking. It's probably common to look at the events of "The World of Tomorrow" and snicker at the naivety of it all. If you've ever looked at how old magazines portrayed the future, it's easy to laugh at the details they did not get right or how over the top some of the visions were. Yet if you step back, much of essence of what the visionaries were contemplating for the future of the United States came to be in the twenty years after the end of WWII.

The power of ideas and imagination is they do set events in motion. The hope for more rational city planning and better housing (covered in the film) was born of the immigrant slums of the nineteenth century and the great depression. It not only drove the design of the fairgrounds but also a great deal of development and housing ideas in the after WWII. While the Westinghouse pavilion's robot is laughable, robots became a fixture in the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike the fictional ones of the Forbidden Planet/Lost in Space/Star Wars variety, they did not walk or talk, but they assemble autos and circuit boards, wash dishes and cars, deliver mail to offices and even vacuum rooms. General Motor's vision of the road system of tomorrow is not very different from what came to be in the age of the interstate. Futurists since the industrial age have had an impact large and small. The countdown to a rocket launch was the invention of Jules Verne.

You can watch this film and take it at face value, quibble with the quality of archive footage, and be entertained. You also can watch it as an evocation of lives past, of a slice of the times. The latter makes The World of Tomorrow different and important.

Nostalgic and haunting

[nettuno85 · 9/10 · 3 June 2010]

I originally watched this documentary on TV probably 15 years ago. I wish I had kept it on VHS because I have been longing to watch it again. It was a look at the 1939 vision of the future. Yes, some was corny and optimistic (the robot, the super highway, planned cities, and airports with spaces for dirigibles)--but no one can really predict the future, right? Who, 40 years ago, could have predicted the world we live in now--cellphones in developing countries, personal computers operated by even the most technologically challenged, DVD, the internet, etc.

I really longed for the world presented in this documentary--a simple, naive world where the future seemed so bright. But right around the corner is WW2.